If you like tales of discovered body parts, heads in concrete in buckets, corpses whose hands have been cut off, decomposition, decay and death, then this fascinating, riveting book is for you.

Deborah Halber, a science writer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has interviewed and traced the investigations of the often-odd amateur sleuths on various websites who try to track down the names of unidentified dead bodies, such as the Lady of the Dunes discovered in Provincetown in 1974 and the “Tent Girl” — whose story Halber unfolds throughout her book (she was finally identified in 1998) — discovered wrapped in a green tarp in Kentucky by Wilbur Riddle. His son-in-law, Todd Matthews, finally cracked the case.

Halber’s done her homework and spun it seamlessly — the often provincial autonomy of local cops who are only slowly accepting the work of the Web crawlers, the nearly 40,000 bodies that still lie in storage to be identified, the success of television shows such as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” that are based on the work of forensic labs, and the mystery of Greg May and his $70,000 Civil War collection of swords and uniforms. Throughout, Halber keeps her eye on the “cold-case-obsessed” and their pursuit of what Homer called “the unwept and unburied corpse.”

These amateurs spend hours on the Internet, searching for solutions to the “dumped, unclaimed … and otherwise abandoned dead people,” the nameless, the disappeared as if “chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.” It’s a mesmerizing, often gruesome avocation, sparked by some deep human need for closure, for naming the dead and allowing them to rest with the proper rites.

One of my favorite characters is George Earl Taylor, who fathered at least 11 children with nine women from 1958 until 1987, when he died, before formally becoming a suspect in the death of Tent Girl.